Description

State and local governments increasingly license digital spatial data,
the dissemination of which by academic libraries requires specific
legal and operational considerations to reconcile license conditions
with public access. We examined this in the context of the American
Geographical Society Library (AGSL) at the University of Wisconsin–
Milwaukee during 2000-05. Wisconsin open records law protects
the right of access to public records, and geographic data is intended
to be in the public domain. Despite this, Wisconsin counties have
dramatically increased their use of licenses for geographic data, and
the use of these licenses has never been challenged under Wisconsin
open records law. The AGSL negotiates existing licenses, conveying
to users the licensing conditions and reassuring the data producers.
We developed user sublicenses including copyright statements,
original licensor’s names, and signed user agreements to the terms
of the original licenses. Each user agreed that failure to comply with
these terms would result in disciplinary action. For security reasons,
all licensed data were delivered on CD-ROMs, which incorporated
the licensing information, forced users to sign the sublicense, and
insured discussion of the licensing issues. To insure consistency, we
developed policies and procedures to be followed for each type of
data request. We also provided to faculty members and students
instruction sessions dealing with data availability and acquisition.

Issue Date:

2006

Publisher:

Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign